Reinventing British, on the Seventieth Floor

Modern British is not a category most diners willingly pay tasting-menu money to learn. Jaan has been quietly insisting they should.

That position is difficult by category. In most of the global restaurant conversation, British cuisine is treated as casual: pub food, comfort food, the kind of cooking that is supposed to be good but not refined. The few attempts at modern British fine dining outside London have mostly struggled to establish themselves against the more familiar European and Asian categories.

The chef at Jaan has, year after year, persisted with the modern British position.

Kirk Westaway joined Jaan around 2011 as a chef de partie under Julien Royer, when the restaurant was running as a French fine-dining room (the original Jaan opened in 2001; Andre Chiang ran Jaan par Andre from 2008 to May 2010 before Royer took over). Westaway became Executive Chef in 2015 after Royer's departure. The full rebrand to Jaan by Kirk Westaway, with the explicit Reinventing British concept, came in 2018, with the official renaming in June 2019.

The cuisine is rooted in British technique: slow-cooked meats, root vegetables, serious sauces, the kind of working pantry that British kitchens have built over centuries. But the format is tasting-menu fine dining. The chef builds his signatures around his Devon childhood. The Egg in an Egg, the room's most-photographed course, releases a burning-rosemary aroma at the table because Westaway's father used to barbecue with rosemary. The Winter Garden salad runs thirty-plus seasonal vegetables (leeks, parsnips, beets, salsify, Brussels sprouts) across a single plate, in the British tradition of treating root vegetables as the working pantry rather than as garnish. The Cheddar sphere is filled with Devon cheddar. None of these are generic European dishes given a British label. They are the cuisine of a specific cook's specific upbringing.

That asking, learn this category, it is rooted in a real place and a real life, is the restaurant's main structural challenge. The chef has, mostly, managed it through the cooking's quality.

The Swissôtel rooftop

The restaurant sits on Level 70 of the Equinox Complex at Swissôtel The Stamford, 2 Stamford Road, with views of the Singapore skyline that the room takes advantage of without performing them. Thirty-five seats. The interior is elegant: dark wood, restrained lighting, generously spaced seating, the kind of careful fine-dining room that hotel restaurants in this category build. The windows are part of the experience without being the entire experience.

The seating is conventional, tables for two and larger tables for groups, with no counter facing the kitchen. The format is the more traditional back-of-house fine-dining experience rather than the open-kitchen counter that newer restaurants prefer. The chef is in the kitchen. The food is brought to the table. The service is the kind of polished fine-dining service the room's positioning requires.

That format is the right one for the cuisine. Modern British cooking is, by tradition, more about the plate than about the visible cooking. The slow-cooked meats and serious sauces require kitchen time the diner cannot really watch in real time. The traditional service style is appropriate.

Lunch runs S$198 for four courses or S$238 for five; dinner is a single S$388 tasting menu. Wine pairing options run from a three-flight at $98 to a full pairing at S$248 to S$268. The cellar carries roughly seven hundred labels. The dress code is enforced.

The Egg in an Egg

The Egg in an Egg was the kitchen's clearest argument on the night.

The course arrives as a small dome on the plate, the shape of an egg shell with a smaller egg inside. The dome is opened tableside, and as it lifts, a small puff of burning rosemary smoke is released. The dish carries its aromatic signature in the air before the diner has tasted anything. The egg inside contains a creamy egg custard built around the yolk, with truffle and caviar folded in.

The first spoonful was the test. The custard had been set to the right consistency, soft enough to hold a spoon, firm enough to retain its structure when lifted. The yolk underneath provided the rich centre. The truffle perfumed the custard. The caviar gave the surface a small saline burst at each touch of the spoon. By the time I tasted the dish, the rosemary smoke had dispersed enough not to crowd the flavours, but it still hung at the back of the palate as a faint reminder.

The dish is, at base, a single small plate doing several things at once. A childhood memory rendered as fine-dining technique. A Devon barbecue compressed into a tableside reveal. An opening course that asks the diner to engage with smell and theatre before flavour. And, on the eating, a properly built custard with real luxury ingredients on top.

By the second spoonful the components had settled into a single course.

This is what a Reinventing British signature should do. The cuisine should feel rooted in a specific place and a specific life. The technique should be at fine-dining level. The aromatic and theatrical elements should be in service of the flavour rather than substituting for it. The course should leave the diner with both a sensory memory and a structural one.

The Egg in an Egg achieves all of these.

The Winter Garden, the cheddar sphere, the rest

The Winter Garden salad, sometimes printed as the English Garden in warmer-season menus, is the dish that demonstrates the kitchen's range of references most directly. Thirty-plus seasonal vegetables, leek through Brussels sprout, dressed in a beetroot-dashi reduction, with Iberian ham and Jerusalem artichoke sauce. In form it is a vegetable course in the high-French tasting-menu tradition, but the ingredient palette is British: root vegetables, brassicas, the kind of pantry a Devon farmhouse would have built around the cold months.

The Cheddar sphere is the dish where the Britishness is most directly named. Devon cheddar, Westaway's home county, filled with date purée and served with hazelnut crumble. The sphere is a contemporary cheese-course gesture; the cheddar is the heritage centre.

Other current signatures: a potato pancake with Kristal caviar and lemon; a violet artichoke custard with egg yolk, more Kristal caviar, chicken sauce, and a truffle toast; Brittany sea bass on an eggplant-barley purée with walnuts and a mushroom sauce; Japanese saffron pasta with scallops, brown butter, and Périgord black truffle; an A4 wagyu tenderloin wrapped in chicken skin, served with a potato stack with foie gras and a beef sauce. The langoustine-truffle-hazelnut course is also a recurring signature across menu cycles.

These are not generic European dishes. They are a Devon cook's interpretation of fine-dining technique, with the British references doing the spine work and the luxury ingredients (caviar, truffle, wagyu) doing the recognisable hotel-fine-dining work.

The wine programme and the friction

The cellar runs roughly seven hundred labels with strong French sections (Burgundy, Bordeaux, Loire, Champagne) and a respectable representation of British wines in the sparkling category. The by-the-glass programme is real. The sommelier service is competent. The pairings across the tasting menu are considered, calibrated to the dishes rather than chosen for prestige.

The friction with Jaan is the friction of the category itself. Some diners will not have a working sense of modern British cuisine. The category does not have the immediate recognition that French, Italian, or Japanese fine dining has. A diner walking in for the first time may not know how to read what they are eating.

The chef has, mostly, made peace with this. The cooking is the cooking. The diner who returns has internalised the category and can read the menu more fluently. The diner who comes once may not fully read what the kitchen is doing. The kitchen does not accommodate dairy, vegan, or gluten allergies, unusual at this tier, though a vegetarian-only alternative tasting menu is available.

The other friction is the hotel setting. The Swissôtel context is, structurally, working against the restaurant's argument. A diner who would happily eat at a standalone version of the same restaurant may feel less excited about taking the elevator to a hotel floor for the same dinner. The restaurant has, mostly, overcome this through the quality of the room and the cooking. But the friction is real.

The pricing is on the higher side of Singapore fine dining, reflecting the room's overhead, the seven-hundred-label cellar, and the sourcing. The third structural friction is more interesting: the restaurant's wider international standing has softened over the last few years even as the kitchen has kept refining the work. The cuisine has not gotten worse. The international press orbit has simply moved on to other categories. Jaan has chosen to keep doing modern British rather than chasing a different format to recover attention.

What the restaurant is for

Jaan is one of the few restaurants in Singapore where modern British cuisine has been argued at fine-dining level over years. Westaway has not retreated to a more familiar European category. The cooking has remained British in its grammar, served at the level the format requires.

The Egg in an Egg, the Winter Garden salad, and the Cheddar sphere are three different routes into the same kitchen. A modern British fine-dining restaurant that has held its category for over a decade, in a city that does not naturally accommodate it, is rare. Jaan has done it. The Egg in an Egg, with its burning-rosemary aroma and its truffle-and-caviar custard, eaten on the Swissôtel's seventieth floor with the Singapore skyline visible through the windows, was the evidence. A Devon childhood compressed into a tableside reveal, in a category the city is still learning to recognise. Westaway took the harder position.

For a restaurant, that has turned out to be enough.